It was five years ago today that twelve jurors unanimously acquitted Michael Jackson on various charges of child molestation, conspiracy and providing alcohol to a minor. It is difficult to know how history will remember the Michael Jackson trial. Perhaps as the epitome of western celebrity obsession. Perhaps as a 21st century lynching. Personally, I think it will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in journalistic history.

It’s not until you find yourself digging through newspaper archives and re-watching hours of TV coverage that you truly understand the magnitude of the media’s failings. It was industry-wide. No doubt, there were certain reporters and even certain publications and TV stations that overtly favored the prosecution, but many of the media’s shortcomings were institutional. In a media obsessed with soundbites, how to you reduce eight hours of testimony into two sentences and remain accurate? In an era of rolling news and instant blogging, how do you resist the temptation to dash out of the courtroom at the earliest opportunity to break news of the latest salacious allegations, even if it means missing a slice of the day’s testimony?

Looking back on the Michael Jackson trial, I see a media out of control. The sheer amount of propaganda, bias, distortion and misinformation is almost beyond comprehension. Reading the court transcripts and comparing them to the newspaper cuttings, the trial that was relayed to us didn’t even resemble the trial that was going on inside the courtroom. The transcripts show an endless parade of seedy prosecution witnesses perjuring themselves on an almost hourly basis and crumbling under cross examination. The newspaper cuttings and the TV news clips detail day after day of heinous accusations and lurid innuendo.

It was November 18th 2003 when 70 sheriffs swooped on Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. As soon as news of the raid broke, news channels abandoned their schedules and switched to 24 hour coverage. When it emerged that Jackson was accused of molesting young cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo, the boy who famously held the singer’s hand in Martin Bashir’s ‘Living With Michael Jackson’, the media went into overdrive. Networks were so obsessed by the Jackson scandal that a terrorist attack in Turkey went almost entirely unreported, with only CNN bothering to broadcast George Bush and Tony Blair’s joint press conference about the disaster.

All three major networks immediately set about producing hour-long specials on the Jackson case, apparently undeterred by the fact that nothing was yet known about the allegations and prosecutors weren’t answering questions. CBS dedicated an episode of 48 Hours Investigates to the arrest, while NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s 20/20 also rushed out Jackson specials. Within two days of the Neverland raid, and before Jackson had even been arrested, VH1 announced a half-hour documentary called ‘Michael Jackson Sex Scandal’.

Daily Variety described the Jackson story as “a godsend for… media outlets, particularly cable news channels and local stations looking to pump up Nielsen numbers in the final week of the all-important November sweeps.”

Daily Variety was right. Celebrity-oriented news shows saw figures spike when the Jackson story hit. Viewing figures for Access Hollywood were up 10% on the previous week. Entertainment Tonight and Extra both achieved season best audience numbers and Celebrity Justice also enjoyed an 8% rise.

Newspapers reacted just as hysterically as TV stations. ‘Sicko!’ shrieked the New York Daily News. ‘Jacko: Now Get Out Of This One’ goaded the New York Post.

The Sun – Britain’s biggest newspaper – ran an article titled ‘He’s Bad, He’s Dangerous, He’s History’. The piece branded Jackson an ‘ex-black ex-superstar’, a ‘freak’ and a ‘twisted individual’ and called for his children to be taken into care. “If he weren’t a pop idol with piles of cash to hide behind,” it said, “he would have been picked up years ago.”

Encouraged by the audience boosts the Jackson scandal had produced, media outlets made it their mission to milk the case for all that they could. Entertainment Weekly’s Tom Sinclair wrote, “Media mavens, from the tackiest tabloid reporter to the nattiest network news anchor, are in overdrive scrambling to fill column inches and airtime with Jacko scoops and talking heads.”

“Pressure on news people is enormous,” attorney Harland Braun told Sinclair. “So lawyers you’ve never heard of wind up on television talking about cases that they have no connection to.”

Sinclair added, “And not just lawyers. Everyone from doctors, writers, and psychiatrists to convenience-store clerks who once waited on Jackson are weighing in on TV and in print.”

While the media was busy badgering a host of quacks and distant acquaintances for their views on the scandal, the team of prosecutors behind the latest Jackson case was engaging in some highly questionable behavior – but the media didn’t seem to care.

During the Neverland raid District Attorney Tom Sneddon – the prosecutor who unsuccessfully pursued Jackson in 1993 – and his officers breached the terms of their own search warrant by entering Jackson’s office and seizing hoards of irrelevant business papers. They also illegally raided the office of a PI working for Jackson’s defense team and lifted defense documents from the home of the singer’s personal assistant.

Sneddon also appeared to be tampering with fundamental elements of his case whenever evidence came to light which undermined the Arvizo family’s claims. For instance, when the DA found out about two taped interviews in which the entire Arvizo family sang Jackson’s praises and denied any abuse, he introduced a conspiracy charge and claimed they’d been forced to lie against their will.

In a similar instance, Jackson’s lawyer Mark Geragos appeared on NBC in January 2004 and announced that the singer had a ‘concrete, iron-clad alibi’ for the dates on the charge sheet. By the time Jackson was re-arraigned in April for the conspiracy charge, the molestation dates on the rap sheet had been shifted by almost two weeks.

Sneddon was later caught seemingly trying to plant fingerprint evidence against Jackson, allowing accuser Gavin Arvizo to handle adult magazines during the grand jury hearings, then bagging them up and sending them away for fingerprint analysis.

Not only did the majority of the media overlook this flurry of questionable and occasionally illegal activity on the part of the prosecution, it also seemed perfectly content to perpetuate damning propaganda on the prosecution’s behalf, despite a complete lack of corroborative evidence. For example, Diane Dimond appeared on Larry King Live days after Jackson’s arrest and spoke repeatedly about a ‘stack of love letters’ the star had supposedly written to Gavin Arvizo.

“Does anyone here… know of the existence of these letters?” asked King.

Dimond admitted that she’d never even seen the letters, let alone read them, but said she knew about them from “high law enforcement sources”. But those love letters never materialized. When Dimond said she ‘absolutely knew’ of their existence she was basing her comments solely on the words of police sources. At best, the police sources were parroting the Arvizos’ allegations in good faith. At worst, they’d concocted the story themselves to sully Jackson’s name. Either way, the story went around the world with not a shred of evidence to support it.

It was over a year between Jackson’s arrest and the beginning of his trial and the media was forced to try to pad the story out for as long as they could in the interim. Aware that Jackson was bound by gag order and therefore powerless to respond, prosecution sympathizers started leaking documents such as Jordan Chandler’s 1993 police statement. The media, hungry for scandal and sensationalism, pounced on them.

At the same time, allegations sold to tabloid TV shows by disgruntled ex-employees in the 1990s were constantly re-hashed and presented as news. Small details of the Arvizo family’s allegations would also periodically leak.

While most media outlets reported these stories as allegations rather than facts, the sheer amount and frequency of stories connecting Jackson to ugly sexual abuse, coupled with his inability to refute them, had a devastating effect on the star’s public image.

The trial began in early 2005 with jury selection. Asked by NBC about prosecution and defense jury selection tactics, Dimond said the difference was that prosecutors would be looking for jurors who had a sense of ‘good versus evil’ and ‘right and wrong’.

No sooner had the jurors been selected than Newsweek was trying to undermine them, claiming that a middle class jury would be unable to fairly judge a family of lower class accusers. In an article titled ‘Playing the Class Card’ the magazine said, “The Jackson trial may hinge on something other than race. And we don’t mean the evidence.”

As the trial kicked into gear, it became quickly apparent that the case was full of holes. The prosecution’s only ‘evidence’ was a stack of heterosexual porn magazines and a couple of legal art books. Thomas Mesereau wrote in a court motion, “The effort to try Mr. Jackson for having one of the largest private libraries in the world is alarming. Not since the dark day of almost three quarters of a century ago has anyone witnessed a prosecution which claimed that the possession of books by well known artists were evidence of a crime against the state.”

Gavin Arvizo’s brother, Star, took the stand early in the trial and claimed to have witnessed two specific acts of molestation but his testimony was completely inconsistent. Regarding one alleged act, he claimed in court that Jackson had been fondling Gavin, but in a previous description of the same incident he told a wildly different story, claiming Jackson had been rubbing his penis against Gavin’s buttocks. He also told two different stories about the other alleged act on two consecutive days in court.

During cross examination Jackson’s lawyer, Thomas Mesereau, showed the boy a copy of Barely Legal and repeatedly asked if it was the specific edition Jackson had shown him and his brother. The boy insisted that it was, only for Mesereau to reveal that it was published in August 2003; five months after the Arvizo family had left Neverland.

But this information went almost entirely unreported, the media focusing on the boy’s allegations rather than the cross examination which undermined them. Allegations make good soundbites. Complex cross examination does not.

When Gavin Arvizo took the stand, he claimed that Jackson had instigated the first act of molestation by telling him that all boys had to masturbate or else they would turn into rapists. But Mesereau showed under cross examination that the boy had previously admitted his grandmother made that comment, not Jackson, meaning that the whole molestation story was predicated on a lie.

Under cross examination the boy severely undermined the prosecution’s conspiracy charge by claiming he’d never felt afraid at Neverland and he’d never wanted to leave. His accounts of the alleged molestation also differed from his brother’s.

Unfortunately for Jackson, Gavin Arvizo’s cross examination was all but ignored as newspapers giggled and gossiped about what became known as ‘pajama day’. On the first day of the boy’s direct examination Jackson slipped in his shower, bruised his lung and was rushed to hospital. When Judge Rodney Melville ordered a bench warrant for Jackson’s arrest unless he arrived within an hour, the singer sped to the courthouse in the pajama trousers he’d been wearing when he was rushed to hospital.

The photographs of Jackson in his pajamas went all over the word, often with no mention of Jackson’s injury or the reason he was wearing them. Many journalists accused Jackson of faking the entire event in order to gain sympathy, although sympathetic is the last word you’d use to describe the media’s reaction.

The incident didn’t stop the media from sending Gavin Arvizo’s lurid allegations around the world the following day. Some outlets even ran the boy’s testimony as fact rather than conjecture. “He Said If Boys Don’t Do It They Might Turn Into Rapists – Cancer Boy Gavin Tells Court of Jacko Sex,” wrote The Mirror.

But the boy’s cross examination was another story. It went almost completely unreported. Instead of stories about Gavin Arvizo’s lies and the two brothers’ contradictory allegations, newspaper pages were filled with snarky opinion pieces about Jackson’s pajamas, even though ‘pajama day’ had been days previously. Thousands of words were dedicated to whether or not Jackson wore a wig and the Sun even ran an article attacking Jackson for the accessories he pinned to his waistcoats every day. It seemed like the press would write anything to avoid discussing the boy’s cross examination, which severely undermined the prosecution’s case.

This habit of reporting lurid allegations but ignoring the cross examination which discredited them became a distinct trend throughout Jackson’s trial. In an April 2005 interview with Matt Drudge, Fox columnist Roger Friedman explained, “What’s not reported is that the cross examination of these witnesses is usually fatal to them.” He added that whenever anybody said anything salacious or dramatic about Jackson, the media ‘went running outside to report on it’ and missed the subsequent cross examination.

Drudge agreed, adding, “You’re not hearing how witness after witness is disintegrating on the stand. There is not one witness, at least lately, that hasn’t admitted to perjuring themselves in previous proceedings either in this case or in some other case.”

This alarming trend of ignoring cross examination was perhaps most apparent in the media’s coverage of Kiki Fournier’s testimony. Under direct examination by the prosecution, Fournier – a Neverland housekeeper – testified that when at Neverland children often became unruly and she had sometimes seen children so hyperactive that they could, feasibly, have been intoxicated. The media scurried outside to report this apparent bombshell and missed one of the most significant pieces of testimony in the entire trial.

Under cross examination by Thomas Mesereau, Fournier said that during the Arvizo family’s final weeks at Neverland – the period during which the molestation supposedly happened – the two boys’ guest room had been constantly messy, leading her to believe they’d been sleeping in their own quarters all along – not Michael Jackson’s bedroom.

She also testified that Star Arvizo had once pulled a knife on her in the kitchen, explaining that she did not feel it had been intended as a joke and that she thought he’d been ‘trying to assert some sort of authority’.

In a devastating blow to the prosecution’s increasingly hilarious conspiracy charge, Fournier laughed at the idea that anybody could be held prisoner at Neverland Ranch, telling the jurors that there was no high fence around the property and the family could have walked out at any time ‘with ease’.

When Gavin and Star’s mother Janet Arvizo took the stand Tom Sneddon was seen with his head in his hands. She claimed that a videotape of herself and her children praising Jackson had been scripted word for word by a German man who barely spoke English. In outtakes she was seen singing Jackson’s praises then looking embarrassed and asking if she was being recorded. She said that had been scripted too.

She claimed she’d been held hostage at Neverland even though log books and receipts showed that she’d left the ranch and returned on three occasions during the period of ‘captivity’. It became apparent that she was currently under investigation for welfare fraud and had also been falsely obtaining money on the back of her son’s illness, holding benefits to pay for his cancer treatment when he was already covered by insurance.

Even the most ardent prosecution supporters had to admit that Janet Arvizo was a disastrous witness for the state. Except Diane Dimond, who in March 2005 seemed to use Janet Arvizo’s welfare fraud (she was convicted in the wake of Jackson’s trial) as roundabout proof of Jackson’s guilt, signing off a New York Post article with the gob smacking line, “Pedophiles don’t target kids with Ozzie and Harriet parents.”

Watching their case crumble before their eyes, the prosecution applied to the judge for permission to admit evidence of ‘prior bad acts’. Permission was granted. Prosecutors told the jury they would hear evidence of five former victims. But those five prior cases turned out to be even more laughable than the Arvizos’ claims.

A parade of disgruntled security guards and housekeepers took the stand to testify that they had witnessed molestation, much of it carried out on three boys; Wade Robson, Brett Barnes and Macauley Culkin. But those three boys were the defense’s first three witnesses, each of them testifying that Jackson had never touched them and they resented the implication.

Moreover, it was revealed that each of these former employees had been fired by Jackson for stealing from his property or had lost a wrongful termination suit and wound up owing Jackson huge amounts of money. They’d also neglected to tell the police when they supposedly witnessed this molestation, even when questioned in connection with Jordy Chandler’s 1993 allegations, but subsequently tried to sell stories to the press – sometimes successfully. The more money on the table, the more salacious the allegations became.

Roger Friedman complained in an interview with Matt Drudge that the media was ignoring the cross examination of the ‘prior bad acts’ witnesses, resulting in skewed reporting. He said, “When Thursday started, that first hour was with this guy Ralph Chacon who had worked at the Ranch as a security guard. He told the most outrageous story. It was so graphic. And of course everybody went running outside to report on it. But there were ten minutes right before the first break on Thursday when Tom Mesereau got up and cross examined this guy and obliterated him.”

The fourth ‘victim’, Jason Francia, took the stand and claimed that when he was a child, Jackson had molested him on three separate occasions. Pushed for details of the ‘molestation’, he said Jackson had tickled him three times outside his clothes and he’d needed years of therapy to get over it. The jury was seen rolling their eyes but reporters including Dan Abrams heralded him as ‘compelling’, predicting that he could be the witness who put Jackson behind bars.

The media repeatedly claimed that Francia’s allegations had been made in 1990, leading audiences to believe that the Jordy Chandler allegations were predated. In actuality, although Jason Francia claimed that the acts of molestation occurred in 1990, he didn’t report them until after the media storm over Chandler’s claims, at which point his mother, Neverland maid Blanca Francia, promptly extracted $20,000 from Hard Copy for an interview with Diane Dimond and another $2.4million in a settlement from Jackson.

Moreover, transcripts from police interviews showed that the Francia had repeatedly changed his story and had originally insisted that he’d never been molested. Transcripts also showed that he only said he was molested after police officers repeatedly overstepped the mark during interviews. Officers repeatedly referred to Jackson as a ‘molester’. On one occasion they told the boy that Jackson was molesting Macauley Culkin as they spoke, claiming that the only way they could rescue Culkin was if Francia told them he’d been sexually abused by the star. Transcripts also showed that Francia had previously said of the police, “They made me come up with stuff. They kept pushing. I wanted to hit them in the head.”

The fifth ‘victim’ was Jordy Chandler, who fled the country rather than testify against his former friend. Thomas Mesereau said in a Harvard lecture later that year, “The prosecutors tried to get him to show up and he wouldn’t. If he had, I had witnesses who were going to come in and say he told them it never happened and that he would never talk to his parents again for what they made him say. It turned out he’d gone into court and got legal emancipation from his parents.”

June Chandler, Jordy’s mother, testified that she hadn’t spoken to her son in 11 years. Questioned about the 1993 case, she seemed to suffer from a severe case of selective memory. At one point she claimed she couldn’t remember being sued by Michael Jackson and at another she said she’d never heard of her own attorney. She also never witnessed any molestation.

When the prosecution rested, the media seemed to lose interest in the trial. The defense case was given comparatively little newspaper space and air time. The Hollywood Reporter, which had been diligently reporting on the Jackson trial, missed out two whole weeks of the defense case. The attitude seemed to be that unless the testimony was graphic and salacious – unless it made a good soundbite – it wasn’t worth reporting.

The defense called numerous fantastic witnesses; boys and girls who had stayed with Jackson time and again and never witnessed any inappropriate behavior, employees who had witnessed the Arvizo boys helping themselves to alcohol in Jackson’s absence and celebrities who had also been targeted for handouts by the accuser. But little of this testimony was relayed to the public. When DA Tom Sneddon referred to black comic Chris Tucker as ‘boy’ during his cross examination, the media didn’t bat an eyelid.

When both sides rested jurors were told that if they found reasonable doubt, they had to acquit. Anybody who had been paying attention to proceedings could see that the doubt was so far beyond reasonable it wasn’t even funny. Almost every single prosecution witness either perjured themselves or wound up helping the defense. There wasn’t a shred of evidence connecting Jackson to any crime and there wasn’t a single credible witness connecting him to a crime either.

But that didn’t stop journalists and pundits from predicting guilty verdicts, CNN’s Nancy Grace leading the way. Defense attorney Robert Shapiro, who had once represented the Chandler family, stated with certainty on CNN, “He’s going to be convicted.” Ex-prosecutor Wendy Murphy told Fox News, “There is no question we will see convictions here.”

The hysteria of the fans outside the courthouse was mirrored by that of the reporters who secured seats inside, who were so excitable that Judge Rodney Melville ordered them to ‘restrain themselves’. Thomas Mesereau commented retrospectively that the media had been “almost salivating about having [Jackson] hauled off to jail.”

When the jury delivered 14 ‘not guilty’ verdicts, the media was ‘humiliated’, Mesereau said in a subsequent interview. Media analyst Tim Rutten later commented, “So what happened when Jackson was acquitted on all counts? Red faces? Second thoughts? A little soul-searching, perhaps? Maybe one expression of regret for the rush to judgment? Naaawww. The reaction, instead, was rage liberally laced with contempt and the odd puzzled expression. Its targets were the jurors… Hell hath no fury like a cable anchor held up for scorn.”

In a post-verdict news conference Sneddon continued to refer to Gavin Arvizo as a ‘victim’ and said he suspected that the ‘celebrity factor’ had impeded the jury’s judgment – a line many media pundits swiftly appropriated as they set about undermining the jurors and their verdicts.

Within minutes of the announcement, Nancy Grace appeared on CourtTV to allege that jurors had been seduced by Jackson’s fame and bizarrely claim that the prosecution’s only weak link had been Janet Arvizo.

“I’m having a crow sandwich right now,” she said. “It doesn’t taste very good. But you know what? I’m also not surprised. I thought that celebrity is such a big factor. When you think you know somebody, when you have watched their concerts, listened to their records, read the lyrics, believed they were coming from somebody’s heart… Jackson is very charismatic, although he never took the stand. That has an effect on this jury.

“I’m not gonna throw a stone at the mom, although I think she was the weak link in the state’s case, but the reality is I’m not surprised. I thought that the jury would vote in favor of the similar transaction witnesses. Apparently the defense overwhelmed them with the cross-examining of the mother. I think it boils down to that, plain and simple.”

Grace later stated that Jackson was ‘not guilty by reason of celebrity’ and was seen attempting to hound jury foreman Paul Rodriguez into saying he believed Jackson had molested children. One of Grace’s guests, psychoanalyst Bethany Marshall, leveled personal attacks towards one female juror, saying, “This is a woman who has no life.”

Over on Fox News, Wendy Murphy branded Jackson ‘the Teflon molester’ and said that the jurors needed IQ tests. She later added, “I really think it’s the celebrity factor, not the evidence. I don’t think the jurors even understand how influenced they were by who Michael Jackson is… They basically put targets on the backs of all, especially highly vulnerable, kids that will now come into Michael Jackson’s life.”

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told CNN that he thought the ‘prior bad acts’ testimony had been ‘effective evidence’, even though various boys at the heart of that testimony had taken the stand as defense witnesses and denied ever being molested. He also claimed that the defense had won because “they could tell a story, and juries, you know, always understand stories rather than sort of individual facts.”

Only Robert Shapiro was dignified in the face of the verdicts, telling viewers that they should accept the jurors’ decision because the jurors were from “a very conservative part of California and if they had no doubt, none of us should have any doubt.”

The following day on Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer upheld the notion that the verdict had been influenced by Jackson’s celebrity status. “Are you sure?” she pleaded. “Are you sure that this gigantically renowned guy walking into the room had no influence at all?”

The Washington Post commented, “An acquittal doesn’t clear his name, it only muddies the water.” Both the New York Post and the New York Daily News ran with the snide headline ‘Boy, Oh, Boy!’

In her final New York Post article about the trial, Diane Dimond bemoaned the not guilty verdict, saying that it left Michael Jackson untouchable. She wrote, “He walked out of court a free man, not guilty on all counts. But Michael Jackson is so much more than free. He now has carte blanche to live his life any way he wants, with whomever he wants, because who would ever try to prosecute Michael Jackson now?”

In Britain’s Sun newspaper, celebrity rent-a-gob and talking head extraordinaire Jane Moore penned an article titled ‘If the jury agree Janet Arvizo is a bad mum (and she IS)… How did they let Jackson off?’ It began: “Michael Jackson is innocent. Justice has been done. Or so the loony tunes gathered outside the courthouse would have us believe.” She went on to question the jurors’ mental capacity and dismiss the American legal system as ‘half-baked’. “Nothing and no one truly emerges as a winner from this sorry mess,” she finished, “least of all what they laughably call American ‘justice’.”

Sun contributor Ally Ross dismissed Jackson’s fans as ‘sad, solitary dick-wits’. Another Sun article, penned by daytime TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, titled ‘Don’t forget the kids still at risk… Jacko’s own’, overtly labeled Jackson a guilty man. Kelly – who never attended Jackson’s trial – bemoaned the fact that Jackson ‘got away with it’, complaining that “instead of languishing in jail, Jackson is now back home in Neverland.” Jackson, she concluded, was “a sad, sick loser who uses his fame and money to dazzle the parents of children he takes a shine to.”

After the initial outrage, the Michael Jackson story slipped out of the headlines. There was little analysis of the not guilty verdicts and how they were reached. An acquittal was considered less profitable than a conviction.

Indeed, Thomas Mesereau said in later years that if Jackson had been convicted it would have created a ‘cottage industry’ for the media, generating a story a day for years to come. Long-running sagas like custody of Jackson’s children, control of his financial empire, other ‘victims’ filing civil suits and the long-winded appeals process would have generated thousands of stories each for months, years, perhaps even decades.

Jackson’s imprisonment would have created a never ending supply of gratuitous headlines; Who is visiting? Who isn’t? Is he in solitary confinement? If not, who are his cellmates? What about his prison wardens? Does he have a prison pen-pal girlfriend? Can we fly a helicopter over the prison yard and film him exercising? The possibilities were endless. A bidding war was raging over who would get the first leaked images of Jackson in his cell before the jury even began its deliberations.

A not guilty verdict was not quite so lucrative. In an interview with Newsweek, CNN boss Jonathan Klein recalled watching the not guilty verdicts come in and then telling his deputies, “We have a less interesting story now.” The Hollywood Reporter noted that hastily assembled TV specials about Jackson’s acquittal performed badly and were beaten in the ratings by a re-run of Nanny 911.

The story was over. There were no apologies and no retractions. There was no scrutiny – no inquiries or investigations. Nobody was held to account for what was done to Michael Jackson. The media was content to let people go on believing their heavily skewed and borderline fictitious account of the trial. That was that.

When Michael Jackson died the media went into overdrive again. What drugs had killed him? How long had he been using them? Who had prescribed them? What else was in his system? How much did he weigh?

But there was one question nobody seemed to want to ask: Why?

Why was Michael Jackson so stressed and so paranoid that he couldn’t even get a decent night’s sleep unless somebody stuck a tube full of anesthetic into his arm? I think the answer can be found in the results of various polls conducted in the wake of Michael Jackson’s trial.

A poll conducted by Gallup in the hours after the verdict showed that 54% of White Americans and 48% of the overall population disagreed with the jury’s decision of ‘not guilty’. The poll also found that 62% of people felt Jackson’s celebrity status was instrumental in the verdicts. 34% said they were ‘saddened’ by the verdict and 24% said they were ‘outraged’. In a Fox News poll 37% of voters said the verdict was ‘wrong’ while an additional 25% said ‘celebrities buy justice’. A poll by People Weekly found that a staggering 88% of readers disagreed with the jury’s decision.

The media did a number on its audience and it did a number on Jackson. After battling his way through an exhausting and horrifying trial, riddled with hideous accusations and character assassinations, Michael Jackson should have felt vindicated when the jury delivered 14 unanimous not guilty verdicts. But the media’s irresponsible coverage of the trial made it impossible for Jackson to ever feel truly vindicated. The legal system may have declared him innocent but the public, on the whole, still thought otherwise. Allegations which were disproven in court went unchallenged in the press. Shaky testimony was presented as fact. The defense’s case was all but ignored.

When asked about those who doubted the verdicts, the jury replied, “They didn’t see what we saw.”

They’re right. We didn’t. But we should have done. And those who refused to tell us remain in their jobs unchecked, unpunished and free to do exactly the same thing to anybody they desire.

Did Michael Do It? The untold story of the events that brought down a superstar

Before O.J. Simpson, there was Michael Jackson—another beloved black celebrity seemingly brought down by allegations of scandal in his personal life. Those allegations—that Jackson had molested a 13-year-old boy—instigated a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, two grand-jury investigations and a shameless media circus. Jackson, in turn, filed charges of extortion against some of his accusers. Ultimately, the suit was settled out of court for a sum that has been estimated at $20 million; no criminal charges were brought against Jackson by the police or the grand juries. This past August, Jackson was in the news again, when Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s daughter, announced that she and the singer had married.

As the dust settles on one of the nation’s worst episodes of media excess, one thing is clear: The American public has never heard a defense of Michael Jackson. Until now.

It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative—that is, prove that something didn’t happen. But it is possible to take an in-depth look at the people who made the allegations against Jackson and thus gain insight into their character and motives. What emerges from such an examination, based on court documents, business records and scores of interviews, is a persuasive argument that Jackson molested no one and that he himself may have been the victim of a well-conceived plan to extract money from him.

More than that, the story that arises from this previously unexplored territory is radically different from the tale that has been promoted by tabloid and even mainstream journalists. It is a story of greed, ambition, misconceptions on the part of police and prosecutors, a lazy and sensation-seeking media and the use of a powerful, hypnotic drug. It may also be a story about how a case was simply invented.

“This attorney I found, I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find,” Chandler said in the recorded conversation with Schwartz. “All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can. He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s very smart, and he’s hungry for the publicity.”

Neither Michael Jackson nor his current defense attorneys agreed to be interviewed for this article. Had they decided to fight the civil charges and go to trial, what follows might have served as the core of Jackson’s defense—as well as the basis to further the extortion charges against his own accusers, which could well have exonerated the singer.

Jackson’s troubles began when his van broke down on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in May 1992. Stranded in the middle of the heavily trafficked street, Jackson was spotted by the wife of Mel Green, an employee at Rent-a-Wreck, an offbeat car-rental agency a mile away. Green went to the rescue. When Dave Schwartz, the owner of the car-rental company, heard Green was bringing Jackson to the lot, he called his wife, June, and told her to come over with their 6-year-old daughter and her son from her previous marriage. The boy, then 12, was a big Jackson fan. Upon arriving, June Chandler Schwartz told Jackson about the time her son had sent him a drawing after the singer’s hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. Then she gave Jackson their home number.

“It was almost like she was forcing [the boy] on him,” Green recalls. “I think Michael thought he owed the boy something, and that’s when it all started.”

Certain facts about the relationship are not in dispute. Jackson began calling the boy, and a friendship developed. After Jackson returned from a promotional tour, three months later, June Chandler Schwartz and her son and daughter became regular guests at Neverland, Jackson’s ranch in Santa Barbara County. During the following year, Jackson showered the boy and his family with attention and gifts, including video games, watches, an after-hours shopping spree at Toys “R” Us and trips around the world—from Las Vegas and Disney World to Monaco and Paris.

By March 1993, Jackson and the boy were together frequently and the sleepovers began. June Chandler Schwartz had also become close to Jackson “and liked him enormously,” one friend says. “He was the kindest man she had ever met.”

Jackson’s personal eccentricities—from his attempts to remake his face through plastic surgery to his preference for the company of children—have been widely reported. And while it may be unusual for a 35-year-old man to have sleepovers with a 13-year-old child, the boy’s mother and others close to Jackson never thought it odd. Jackson’s behavior is better understood once it’s put in the context of his own childhood.

“Contrary to what you might think, Michael’s life hasn’t been a walk in the park,” one of his attorneys says. Jackson’s childhood essentially stopped—and his unorthodox life began—when he was 5 years old and living in Gary, Indiana. Michael spent his youth in rehearsal studios, on stages performing before millions of strangers and sleeping in an endless string of hotel rooms. Except for his eight brothers and sisters, Jackson was surrounded by adults who pushed him relentlessly, particularly his father, Joe Jackson—a strict, unaffectionate man who reportedly beat his children.

Jackson’s early experiences translated into a kind of arrested development, many say, and he became a child in a man’s body. “He never had a childhood,” says Bert Fields, a former attorney of Jackson’s. “He is having one now. His buddies are 12-year-old kids. They have pillow fights and food fights.” Jackson’s interest in children also translated into humanitarian efforts. Over the years, he has given millions to causes benefiting children, including his own Heal The World Foundation.

But there is another context—the one having to do with the times in which we live—in which most observers would evaluate Jackson’s behavior. “Given the current confusion and hysteria over child sexual abuse,” says Dr. Phillip Resnick, a noted Cleveland psychiatrist, “any physical or nurturing contact with a child may be seen as suspicious, and the adult could well be accused of sexual misconduct.”

Jackson’s involvement with the boy was welcomed, at first, by all the adults in the youth’s life—his mother, his stepfather and even his biological father, Evan Chandler (who also declined to be interviewed for this article). Born Evan Robert Charmatz in the Bronx in 1944, Chandler had reluctantly followed in the footsteps of his father and brothers and become a dentist. “He hated being a dentist,” a family friend says. “He always wanted to be a writer.” After moving in 1973 to West Palm Beach to practice dentistry, he changed his last name, believing Charmatz was “too Jewish-sounding,” says a former colleague. Hoping somehow to become a screenwriter, Chandler moved to Los Angeles in the late Seventies with his wife, June Wong, an attractive Eurasian who had worked briefly as a model.

Chandler’s dental career had its precarious moments. In December 1978, while working at the Crenshaw Family Dental Center, a clinic in a low-income area of L.A., Chandler did restoration work on sixteen of a patient’s teeth during a single visit. An examination of the work, the Board of Dental Examiners concluded, revealed “gross ignorance and/or inefficiency” in his profession. The board revoked his license; however, the revocation was stayed, and the board instead suspended him for ninety days and placed him on probation for two and a half years. Devastated, Chandler left town for New York. He wrote a film script but couldn’t sell it.

Months later, Chandler returned to L.A. with his wife and held a series of dentistry jobs. By 1980, when their son was born, the couple’s marriagewas in trouble. “One of the reasons June left Evan was because of his temper,” a family friend says. They divorced in 1985. The court awarded sole custody of the boy to his mother and ordered Chandler to pay $500 a month in child support, but a review of documents reveals that in 1993, when the Jackson scandal broke, Chandler owed his ex-wife $68,000—a debt she ultimately forgave.

A year before Jackson came into his son’s life, Chandler had a second serious professional problem. One of his patients, a model, sued him for dental negligence after he did restoration work on some of her teeth. Chandler claimed that the woman had signed a consent form in which she’d acknowledged the risks involved. But when Edwin Zinman, her attorney, asked to see the original records, Chandler said they had been stolen from the trunk of his Jaguar. He provided a duplicate set. Zinman, suspicious, was unable to verify the authenticity of the records. “What an extraordinary coincidence that they were stolen,” Zinman says now. “That’s like saying ‘The dog ate my homework.’ ” The suit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Despite such setbacks, Chandler by then had a successful practice in Beverly Hills. And he got his first break in Hollywood in 1992, when he cowrote the Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Until Michael Jackson entered his son’s life, Chandler hadn’t shown all that much interest in the boy. “He kept promising to buy him a computer so they could work on scripts together, but he never did,” says Michael Freeman, formerly an attorney for June Chandler Schwartz. Chandler’s dental practice kept him busy, and he had started anew family by then, with two small children by his second wife, a corporate attorney.

At first, Chandler welcomed and encouraged his son’s relationship with Michael Jackson, bragging about it to friends and associates. When Jackson and the boy stayed with Chandler during May 1993, Chandler urged the entertainer to spend more time with his son at his house. According to sources, Chandler even suggested that Jackson build an addition onto the house so the singer could stay there. After calling the zoning department and discovering it couldn’t be done, Chandler made another suggestion—that Jackson just build him a new home.

That same month, the boy, his mother and Jackson flew to Monaco for the World Music Awards. “Evan began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out,” Freeman says. Upon their return, Jackson and the boy again stayed with Chandler, which pleased him—a five-day visit, during which they slept in a room with the youth’s half brother. Though Chandler has admitted that Jackson and the boy always had their clothes on whenever he saw them in bed together, he claimed that it was during this time that his suspicions of sexual misconduct were triggered. At no time has Chandler claimed to have witnessed any sexual misconduct on Jackson’s part.

Chandler became increasingly volatile, making threats that alienated Jackson, Dave Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz. In early July 1993, Dave Schwartz, who had been friendly with Chandler, secretly tape-recorded a lengthy telephone conversation he had with him. During the conversation, Chandler talked of his concern for his son and his anger at Jackson and at his ex-wife, whom he described as “cold and heartless.” When Chandler tried to “get her attention” to discuss his suspicions about Jackson, he says on the tape, she told him “Go fuck yourself.”

“I had a good communication with Michael,” Chandler told Schwartz. “We were friends. I liked him and I respected him and everything else for what he is. There was no reason why he had to stop calling me. I sat in the room one day and talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship. What I want.”

Admitting to Schwartz that he had “been rehearsed” about what to say and what not to say, Chandler never mentioned money during their conversation. When Schwartz asked what Jackson had done that made Chandler so upset, Chandler alleged only that “he broke up the family. [The boy] has been seduced by this guy’s power and money.” Both men repeatedly berated themselves as poor fathers to the boy.

Elsewhere on the tape, Chandler indicated he was prepared to move against Jackson: “It’s already set,” Chandler told Schwartz. “There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I’ve paid them to do it. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy [his attorney, Barry K. Rothman, presumably] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. And I’ve given him full authority to do that.”

Chandler then predicted what would, in fact, transpire six weeks later: “And if I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I’ve checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son]…and Michael’s career will be over.”

“Does that help [the boy]?” Schwartz asked.

“That’s irrelevant to me,” Chandler replied. “It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want.”

Instead of going to the police, seemingly the most appropriate action in a situation involving suspected child molestation, Chandler had turned to a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. He’d turned to Barry Rothman.

“This attorney I found, I picked the nastiest son of a bitch I could find,” Chandler said in the recorded conversation with Schwartz. “All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can. He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s very smart, and he’s hungry for the publicity.” (Through his attorney, Wylie Aitken, Rothman declined to be interviewed for this article. Aitken agreed to answer general questions limited to the Jackson case, and then only about aspects that did not involve Chandler or the boy.)

To know Rothman, says a former colleague who worked with him during the Jackson case, and who kept a diary of what Rothman and Chandler said and did in Rothman’s office, is to believe that Barry could have “devised this whole plan, period. This [making allegations against Michael Jackson] is within the boundary of his character, to do something like this.” Information supplied by Rothman’s former clients, associates and employees reveals a pattern of manipulation and deceit.

Rothman has a general-law practice in Century City. At one time, he negotiated music and concert deals for Little Richard, the Rolling Stones, the Who, ELO and Ozzy Osbourne. Gold and platinum records commemorating those days still hang on the walls of his office. With his grayish-white beard and perpetual tan—which he maintains in a tanning bed at his house—Rothman reminds a former client of “a leprechaun.” To a former employee, Rothman is “a demon” with “a terrible temper.” His most cherished possession, acquaintances say, is his 1977 Rolls-Royce Corniche, which carries the license plate “BKR 1.”

Over the years, Rothman has made so many enemies that his ex-wife once expressed, to her attorney, surprise that someone “hadn’t done him in.” He has a reputation for stiffing people. “He appears to be a professional deadbeat… He pays almost no one,” investigator Ed Marcus concluded (in a report filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, as part of a lawsuit against Rothman), after reviewing the attorney’s credit profile, which listed more than thirty creditors and judgment holders who were chasing him. In addition, more than twenty civil lawsuits involving Rothman have been filed in Superior Court, several complaints have been made to the Labor Commission and disciplinary actions for three incidents have been taken against him by the state bar of California. In 1992, he was suspended for a year, though that suspension was stayed and he was instead placed on probation for the term.

In 1987, Rothman was $16,800 behind in alimony and child-support payments. Through her attorney, his ex-wife, Joanne Ward, threatened to attach Rothman’s assets, but he agreed to make good on the debt. A year later, after Rothman still hadn’t made the payments, Ward’s attorney tried to put a lien on Rothman’s expensive Sherman Oaks home. To their surprise, Rothman said he no longer owned the house;three years earlier, he’d deeded the property to Tinoa Operations, Inc., a Panamanian shell corporation. According to Ward’s lawyer, Rothman claimed that he’d had $200,000 of Tinoa’s money, in cash, at his house one night when he was robbed at gunpoint. The only way he could make good on the loss was to deed his home to Tinoa, he told them. Ward and her attorney suspected the whole scenario was a ruse, but they could never prove it. It was only after sheriff’s deputies had towed away Rothman’s Rolls Royce that he began paying what he owed.

Documents filed with Los Angeles Superior Court seem to confirm the suspicions of Ward and her attorney. These show that Rothman created an elaborate network of foreign bank accounts and shell companies, seemingly to conceal some of his assets—in particular, his home and much of the $531,000 proceeds from its eventual sale, in 1989. The companies, including Tinoa, can be traced to Rothman. He bought a Panamanian shelf company (an existing but nonoperating firm) and arranged matters so that though his name would not appear on the list of its officers, he would have unconditional power of attorney, in effect leaving him in control of moving money in and out.

Meanwhile, Rothman’s employees didn’t fare much better than his ex-wife. Former employees say they sometimes had to beg for their paychecks. And sometimes the checks that they did get would bounce. He couldn’t keep legal secretaries. “He’d demean and humiliate them,” says one. Temporary workers fared the worst. “He would work them for two weeks,” adds the legal secretary, “then run them off by yelling at them and saying they were stupid. Then he’d tell the agency he was dissatisfied with the temp and wouldn’t pay.” Some agencies finally got wise and made Rothman pay cash up front before they’d do business with him.

The state bar’s 1992 disciplining of Rothman grew out of a conflict-of-interest matter. A year earlier, Rothman had been kicked off a case by a client, Muriel Metcalf, whom he’d been representing in child-support and custody proceedings; Metcalf later accused him of padding her bill. Four months after Metcalf fired him, Rothman, without notifying her, began representing the company of her estranged companion, Bob Brutzman.

The case is revealing for another reason: It shows that Rothman had some experience dealing with child-molestation allegations before the Jackson scandal. Metcalf, while Rothman was still representing her, had accused Brutzman of molesting their child (which Brutzman denied). Rothman’s knowledge of Metcalf’s charges didn’t prevent him from going to work for Brutzman’s company—a move for which he was disciplined.

By 1992, Rothman was running from numerous creditors. Folb Management, a corporate real-estate agency, was one. Rothman owed the company $53,000 in back rent and interest for an office on Sunset Boulevard. Folb sued. Rothman then countersued, claiming that the building’s security was so inadequate that burglars were able to steal more than $6,900 worth of equipment from his office one night. In the course of the proceedings, Folb’s lawyer told the court, “Mr. Rothman is not the kind of person whose word can be taken at face value.”

In November 1992, Rothman had his law firm file for bankruptcy, listing thirteen creditors—including Folb Management—with debts totaling $880,000 and no acknowledged assets. After reviewing the bankruptcy papers, an ex-client whom Rothman was suing for $400,000 in legal fees noticed that Rothman had failed to list a $133,000 asset. The former client threatened to expose Rothman for “defrauding his creditors”—a felony—if he didn’t drop the lawsuit. Cornered, Rothman had the suit dismissed in a matter of hours.

Six months before filing for bankruptcy, Rothman had transferred title on his Rolls-Royce to Majo, a fictitious company he controlled. Three years earlier, Rothman had claimed a different corporate owner for the car—Longridge Estates, a subsidiary of Tinoa Operations, the company that held the deed to his home. On corporation papers filed by Rothman, the addresses listed for Longridge and Tinoa were the same, 1554 Cahuenga Boulevard—which, as it turns out, is that of a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood.

It was with this man, in June 1993, that Evan Chandler began carrying out the “certain plan” to which he referred in his taped conversation with Dave Schwartz. At a graduation that month, Chandler confronted his ex-wife with his suspicions. “She thought the whole thing was baloney,” says her ex-attorney, Michael Freeman. She told Chandler that she planned to take their son out of school in the fall so they could accompany Jackson on his “Dangerous” world tour. Chandler became irate and, say several sources, threatened to go public with the evidence he claimed he had on Jackson. “What parent in his right mind would want to drag his child into the public spotlight?” asks Freeman. “If something like this actually occurred, you’d want to protect your child.”

Jackson asked his then-lawyer, Bert Fields, to intervene. One of the most prominent attorneys in the entertainment industry, Fields has been representing Jackson since 1990 and had negotiated for him, with Sony, the biggest music deal ever—with possible earnings of $700 million. Fields brought in investigator Anthony Pellicano to help sort things out. Pellicano does things Sicilian-style, being fiercely loyal to those he likes but a ruthless hardball player when it comes to his enemies.

Given the facts about sodium Amytal and a recent landmark case that involved the drug, the boy’s allegations, say several medical experts, must be viewed as unreliable, if not highly questionable.“It’s a psychiatric medication that cannot be relied on to produce fact.”

On July 9, 1993, Dave Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz played the taped conversation for Pellicano. “After listening to the tape for ten minutes, I knew it was about extortion,” says Pellicano. That same day, he drove to Jackson’s Century City condominium, where Chandler’s son and the boy’s half-sister were visiting. Without Jackson there, Pellicano “made eye contact” with the boy and asked him, he says, “very pointed questions”: “Has Michael ever touched you? Have you ever seen him naked in bed?” The answer to all the questions was no. The boy repeatedly denied that anything bad had happened. On July 11, after Jackson had declined to meet with Chandler, the boy’s father and Rothman went ahead with another part of the plan—they needed to get custody of the boy. Chandler asked his ex-wife to let the youth stay with him for a “one-week visitation period.” As Bert Fields later said in an affidavit to the court, June Chandler Schwartz allowed the boy to go based on Rothman’s assurance to Fields that her son would come back to her after the specified time, never guessing that Rothman’s word would be worthless and that Chandler would not return their son.

Wylie Aitken, Rothman’s attorney, claims that “at the time [Rothman] gave his word, it was his intention to have the boy returned.” However, once “he learned that the boy would be whisked out of the country [to go on tour with Jackson], I don’t think Mr. Rothman had any other choice.” But the chronology clearly indicates that Chandler had learned in June, at the graduation, that the boy’s mother planned to take her son on the tour. The taped telephone conversation made in early July, before Chandler took custody of his son, also seems to verify that Chandler and Rothman had no intention of abiding by the visitation agreement. “They [the boy and his mother] don’t know it yet,” Chandler told Schwartz, “but they aren’t going anywhere.”

On July 12, one day after Chandler took control of his son, he had his ex-wife sign a document prepared by Rothman that prevented her from taking the youth out of Los Angeles County. This meant the boy would be unable to accompany Jackson on the tour. His mother told the court she signed the document under duress. Chandler, she said in an affidavit, had threatened that “I would not have [the boy] returned to me.” A bitter custody battle ensued, making even murkier any charges Chandler made about wrong-doing on Jackson’s part. (As of this August [1994], the boy was still living with Chandler.) It was during the first few weeks after Chandler took control of his son—who was now isolated from his friends, mother and stepfather—that the boy’s allegations began to take shape.

At the same time, Rothman, seeking an expert’s opinion to help establish the allegations against Jackson, called Dr. Mathis Abrams, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. Over the telephone, Rothman presented Abrams with a hypothetical situation. In reply and without having met either Chandler or his son, Abrams on July 15 sent Rothman a two-page letter in which he stated that “reasonable suspicion would exist that sexual abuse may have occurred.” Importantly, he also stated that if this were a real and not a hypothetical case, he would be required by law to report the matter to the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services (DCS).

According to a July 27 entry in the diary kept by Rothman’s former colleague, it’s clear that Rothman was guiding Chandler in the plan. “Rothman wrote letter to Chandler advising him how to report child abuse without liability to parent,” the entry reads.

At this point, there still had been made no demands or formal accusations, only veiled assertions that had become intertwined with a fierce custody battle. On August 4, 1993, however, things became very clear. Chandler and his son met with Jackson and Pellicano in a suite at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. On seeing Jackson, says Pellicano, Chandler gave the singer an affectionate hug (a gesture, some say, that would seem to belie the dentist’s suspicions that Jackson had molested his son), then reached into his pocket, pulled out Abrams’s letter and began reading passages from it. When Chandler got to the parts about child molestation, the boy, says Pellicano, put his head down and then looked up at Jackson with a surprised expression, as if to say “I didn’t say that.” As the meeting broke up, Chandler pointed his finger at Jackson, says Pellicano, and warned “I’m going to ruin you.”

At a meeting with Pellicano in Rothman’s office later that evening, Chandler and Rothman made their demand – $20 million.

On August 13, there was another meeting in Rothman’s office. Pellicano came back with a counteroffer—a $350,000 screenwriting deal. Pellicano says he made the offer as a way to resolve the custody dispute and give Chandler an opportunity to spend more time with his son by working on a screenplay together. Chandler rejected the offer. Rothman made a counterdemand—a deal for three screenplays or nothing—which was spurned. In the diary of Rothman’s ex-colleague, an August 24 entry reveals Chandler’s disappointment: “I almost had a $20 million deal,” he was overheard telling Rothman.

Before Chandler took control of his son, the only one making allegations against Jackson was Chandler himself—the boy had never accused the singer of any wrongdoing. That changed one day in Chandler’s Beverly Hills dental office.

In the presence of Chandler and Mark Torbiner, a dental anesthesiologist, the boy was administered the controversial drug sodium Amytal—which some mistakenly believe is a truth serum. And it was after this session that the boy first made his charges against Jackson. A newsman at KCBS-TV, in L.A., reported on May 3 of this year that Chandler had used the drug on his son, but the dentist claimed he did so only to pull his son’s tooth and that while under the drug’s influence, the boy came out with allegations. Asked for this article about his use of the drug on the boy, Torbiner replied: “If I used it, it was for dental purposes.”

Given the facts about sodium Amytal and a recent landmark case that involved the drug, the boy’s allegations, say several medical experts, must be viewed as unreliable, if not highly questionable.

“It’s a psychiatric medication that cannot be relied on to produce fact,” says Dr. Resnick, the Cleveland psychiatrist. “People are very suggestible under it. People will say things under sodium Amytal that are blatantly untrue.” Sodium Amytal is a barbiturate, an invasive drug that puts people in a hypnotic state when it’s injected intravenously. Primarily administered for the treatment of amnesia, it first came into use during World War II, on soldiers traumatized—some into catatonic states—by the horrors of war. Scientific studies done in 1952 debunked the drug as a truth serum and instead demonstrated its risks: False memories can be easily implanted in those under its influence. “It is quite possible to implant an idea through the mere asking of a question,” says Resnick. But its effects are apparently even more insidious: “The idea can become their memory, and studies have shown that even when you tell them the truth, they will swear on a stack of Bibles that it happened,” says Resnick.

Recently, the reliability of the drug became an issue in a high-profile trial in Napa County, California. After undergoing numerous therapy sessions, at least one of which included the use of sodium Amytal, 20-year-old Holly Ramona accused her father of molesting her as a child. Gary Ramona vehemently denied the charge and sued his daughter’s therapist and the psychiatrist who had administered the drug. This past May, jurors sided with Gary Ramona, believing that the therapist and the psychiatrist may have reinforced memories that were false. Gary Ramona’s was the first successful legal challenge to the so-called “repressed memory phenomenon” that has produced thousands of sexual-abuse allegations over the past decade.

As for Chandler’s story about using the drug to sedate his son during a tooth extraction, that too seems dubious, in light of the drug’s customary use. “It’s absolutely a psychiatric drug,” says Dr. Kenneth Gottlieb, a San Francisco psychiatrist who has administeredsodium Amytal to amnesia patients. Dr. John Yagiela, the coordinator of the anesthesia and pain control department of UCLA’s school of dentistry, adds, “It’s unusual for it to be used [for pulling a tooth]. It makes no sense when better, safer alternatives are available. It would not be my choice.”

Because of sodium Amytal’s potential side effects, some doctors will administer it only in a hospital. “I would never want to use a drug that tampers with a person’s unconscious unless there was no other drug available,” says Gottlieb. “And I would not use it without resuscitating equipment, in case of allergic reaction, and only with an M.D. anesthesiologist present.”

Chandler, it seems, did not follow these guidelines. He had the procedure performed on his son in his office, and he relied on the dental anesthesiologist Mark Torbiner for expertise. (It was Torbiner who’d introduced Chandler and Rothman in 1991, when Rothman needed dental work.)

The nature of Torbiner’s practice appears to have made it highly successful. “He boasts that he has $100 a month overhead and $40,000 a month income,” says Nylla Jones, a former patient of his. Torbiner doesn’t have an office for seeing patients; rather, he travels to various dental offices around the city, where he administers anesthesia during procedures.

This magazine has learned that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is probing another aspect of Torbiner’s business practices: He makes housecalls to administer drugs—mostly morphine and Demerol—not only postoperatively to his dental patients but also, it seems, to those suffering pain whose source has nothing to do with dental work. He arrives at the homes of his clients—some of them celebrities—carrying a kind of fishing-tackle box that contains drugs and syringes. At one time, the license plate on his Jaguar read “SLPYDOC.” According to Jones, Torbiner charges $350 for a basic ten-to-twenty-minute visit. In what Jones describes as standard practice, when it’s unclear how long Torbiner will need to stay, the client, anticipating the stupor that will soon set in, leaves a blank check for Torbiner to fill in with the appropriate amount.

Torbiner wasn’t always successful. In 1989, he got caught in a lie and was asked to resign from UCLA, where he was an assistant professor at the school of dentistry. Torbiner had asked to take a half-day off so he could observe a religious holiday but was later found to have worked at a dental office instead.

A check of Torbiner’s credentials with the Board of Dental Examiners indicates that he is restricted by law to administering drugs solely for dental-related procedures. But there is clear evidence that he has not abided by those restrictions. In fact, on at least eight occasions, Torbiner has given a general anesthetic to Barry Rothman, during hair-transplant procedures. Though normally a local anesthetic would be injected into the scalp, “Barry is so afraid of the pain,” says Dr. James De Yarman, the San Diego physician who performed Rothman’s transplants, “that [he] wanted to be put out completely.” De Yarman said he was “amazed” to learn that Torbiner is a dentist, having assumed all along that he was an M.D.

In another instance, Torbiner came to the home of Nylla Jones, she says, and injected her with Demerol to help dull the pain that followed her appendectomy.

On August 16, three days after Chandler and Rothman rejected the $350,000 script deal, the situation came to a head. On behalf of June Chandler Schwartz, Michael Freeman notified Rothman that he would be filing papers early the next morning that would force Chandler to turn over the boy. Reacting quickly, Chandler took his son to Mathis Abrams, the psychiatrist who’d provided Rothman with his assessment of the hypothetical child-abuse situation. During a three-hour session, the boy alleged that Jackson had engaged in a sexual relationship with him. He talked of masturbation, kissing, fondling of nipples and oral sex. There was, however, no mention of actual penetration, which might have been verified by a medical exam, thus providing corroborating evidence.

The next step was inevitable. Abrams, who is required by law to report any such accusation to authorities, called a social worker at the Department of Children’s Services, who in turn contacted the police. The full-scale investigation of Michael Jackson was about to begin.

Five days after Abrams called the authorities, the media got wind of the investigation. On Sunday morning, August 22, Don Ray, a free-lance reporter in Burbank, was asleep when his phone rang. The caller, one of his tipsters, said that warrants had been issued to search Jackson’s ranch and condominium. Ray sold the story to L.A.’s KNBC-TV, which broke the news at 4 P.M. the following day.

After that, Ray “watched this story go away like a freight train,” he says. Within twenty-four hours, Jackson was the lead story on seventy-three TV news broadcasts in the Los Angeles area alone and was on the front page of every British newspaper. The story of Michael Jackson and the 13-year-old boy became a frenzy of hype and unsubstantiated rumor, with the line between tabloid and mainstream media virtually eliminated.

The extent of the allegations against Jackson wasn’t known until August 25. A person inside the DCS illegally leaked a copy of the abuse report to Diane Dimond of Hard Copy. Within hours, the L.A. office of a British news service also got the report and began selling copies to any reporter willing to pay $750. The following day, the world knew about the graphic details in the leaked report. “While laying next to each other in bed, Mr. Jackson put his hand under [the child’s] shorts,” the social worker had written. From there, the coverage soon demonstrated that anything about Jackson would be fair game.

“Competition among news organizations became so fierce,” says KNBC reporter Conan Nolan, that “stories weren’t being checked out. It was very unfortunate.” The National Enquirer put twenty reporters and editors on the story. One team knocked on 500 doors in Brentwood trying to find Evan Chandler and his son. Using property records, they finally did, catching up with Chandler in his black Mercedes. “He was not a happy man. But I was,” said Andy O’Brien, a tabloid photographer.

Next came the accusers—Jackson’s former employees. First, Stella and Philippe Lemarque, Jackson’ ex-housekeepers, tried to sell their story to the tabloids with the help of broker Paul Barresi, a former porn star. They asked for as much as half a million dollars but wound up selling an interview to The Globe of Britain for $15,000. The Quindoys, a Filipino couple who had worked at Neverland, followed. When their asking price was $100,000, they said ” ‘the hand was outside the kid’s pants,’ ” Barresi told a producer of Frontline, a PBS program. “As soon as their price went up to $500,000, the hand went inside the pants. So come on.” The L.A. district attorney’s office eventually concluded that both couples were useless as witnesses.

Next came the bodyguards. Purporting to take the journalistic high road, Hard Copy’s Diane Dimond told Frontline in early November of last year that her program was “pristinely clean on this. We paid no money for this story at all.” But two weeks later, as a Hard Copy contract reveals, the show was negotiating a $100,000 payment to five former Jackson security guards who were planning to file a $10 million lawsuit alleging wrongful termination of their jobs.

On December 1, with the deal in place, two of the guards appeared on the program; they had been fired, Dimond told viewers, because “they knew too much about Michael Jackson’s strange relationship with young boys.” In reality, as their depositions under oath three months later reveal, it was clear they had never actually seen Jackson do anything improper with Chandler’s son or any other child:

“So you don’t know anything about Mr. Jackson and [the boy], do you?” one of Jackson’s attorneys asked former security guard Morris Williams under oath.

“All I know is from the sworn documents that other people have sworn to.”

“But other than what someone else may have said, you have no firsthand knowledge about Mr. Jackson and [the boy], do you?”

“That’s correct.”

“Have you spoken to a child who has ever told you that Mr. Jackson did anything improper with the child?”

“No.”

When asked by Jackson’s attorney where he had gotten his impressions, Williams replied: “Just what I’ve been hearing in the media and what I’ve experienced with my own eyes.”

“Okay. That’s the point. You experienced nothing with your own eyes, did you?”

“That’s right, nothing.”

(The guards’ lawsuit, filed in March 1994, was still pending as this article went to press.)

[NOTE: The case was thrown out of court in July 1995.]

Next came the maid. On December 15, Hard Copy presented “The Bedroom Maid’s Painful Secret.” Blanca Francia told Dimond and other reporters that she had seen a naked Jackson taking showers and Jacuzzi baths with young boys. She also told Dimond that she had witnessed her own son in compromising positions with Jackson—an allegation that the grand juries apparently never found credible.

A copy of Francia’s sworn testimony reveals that Hard Copy paid her $20,000, and had Dimond checked out the woman’s claims, she would have found them to be false. Under deposition by a Jackson attorney, Francia admitted she had never actually see Jackson shower with anyone nor had she seen him naked with boys in his Jacuzzi. They always had their swimming trunks on, she acknowledged.

The coverage, says Michael Levine, a Jackson press representative, “followed a proctologist’s view of the world. Hard Copy was loathsome. The vicious and vile treatment of this man in the media was for selfish reasons. [Even] if you have never bought a Michael Jackson record in your life, you should be very concerned. Society is built on very few pillars. One of them is truth. When you abandon that, it’s a slippery slope.”

The investigation of Jackson, which by October 1993 would grow to involve at least twelve detectives from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties, was instigated in part by the perceptions of one psychiatrist, Mathis Abrams, who had no particular expertise in child sexual abuse. Abrams, the DCS caseworker’s report noted, “feels the child is telling the truth.” In an era of widespread and often false claims of child molestation, police and prosecutors have come to give great weight to the testimony of psychiatrists, therapists and social workers.

Police seized Jackson’s telephone books during the raid on his residences in August and questioned close to thirty children and their families. Some, such as Brett Barnes and Wade Robson, said they had shared Jackson’s bed, but like all the others, they gave the same response—Jackson had done nothing wrong. “The evidence was very good for us,” says an attorney who worked on Jackson’s defense. “The other side had nothing but a big mouth.”

Despite the scant evidence supporting their belief that Jackson was guilty, the police stepped up their efforts. Two officers flew to the Philippines to try to nail down the Quindoys’ “hand in the pants” story, but apparently decided it lacked credibility. The police also employed aggressive investigative techniques—including allegedly telling lies—to push the children into making accusations against Jackson. According to several parents who complained to Bert Fields, officers told them unequivocally that their children had been molested, even though the children denied to their parents that anything bad had happened. The police, Fields complained in a letter to Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, “have also frightened youngsters with outrageous lies, such as ‘We have nude photos of you.’ There are, of course, no such photos.” One officer, Federico Sicard, told attorney Michael Freeman that he had lied to the children he’d interviewed and told them that he himself had been molested as a child, says Freeman. Sicard did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.

All along, June Chandler Schwartz rejected the charges Chandler was making against Jackson—until a meeting with police in late August 1993. Officers Sicard and Rosibel Ferrufino made a statement that began to change her mind. “[The officers] admitted they only had one boy,” says Freeman, who attended the meeting, “but they said, ‘We’re convinced Michael Jackson molested this boy because he fits the classic profile of a pedophile perfectly.’ ”

“There’s no such thing as a classic profile. They made a completely foolish and illogical error,” says Dr. Ralph Underwager, a Minneapolis psychiatrist who has treated pedophiles and victims of incest since 1953. Jackson, he believes, “got nailed” because of “misconceptions like these that have been allowed to parade as fact in an era of hysteria.” In truth, as a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study shows, many child-abuse allegations—48 percent of those filed in 1990 —proved to be unfounded.

“It was just a matter of time before someone like Jackson became a target,” says Phillip Resnick. “He’s rich, bizarre, hangs around with kids and there is a fragility to him. The atmosphere is such that an accusation must mean it happened.”

The seeds of settlement were already being sown as the police investigation continued in both counties through the fall of 1993. And a behind-the-scenes battle among Jackson’s lawyers for control of the case, which would ultimately alter the course the defense would take, had begun.

By then, June Chandler Schwartz and Dave Schwartz had united with Evan Chandler against Jackson. The boy’s mother, say several sources, feared what Chandler and Rothman might do if she didn’t side with them. She worried that they would try to advance a charge against her of parental neglect for allowing her son to have sleepovers with Jackson. Her attorney, Michael Freeman, in turn, resigned in disgust, saying later that “the whole thing was such a mess. I felt uncomfortable with Evan. He isn’t a genuine person, and I sensed he wasn’t playing things straight.”

Over the months, lawyers for both sides were retained, demoted and ousted as they feuded over the best strategy to take. Rothman ceased being Chandler’s lawyer in late August, when the Jackson camp filed extortion charges against the two. Both then hired high-priced criminal defense attorneys to represent them.. (Rothman retained Robert Shapiro, now O.J. Simpson’s chief lawyer.) According to the diary kept by Rothman’s former colleague, on August 26, before the extortion charges were filed, Chandler was heard to say “It’s my ass that’s on the line and in danger of going to prison.” The investigation into the extortion charges was superficial because, says a source, “the police never took it that seriously. But a whole lot more could have been done.” For example, as they had done with Jackson, the police could have sought warrants to search the homes and offices of Rothman and Chandler. And when both men, through their attorneys, declined to be interviewed by police, a grand jury could have been convened.

“It was just a matter of time before someone like Jackson became a target. He’s rich, bizarre [and] hangs around with kids…

In mid-September, Larry Feldman, a civil attorney who’d served as head of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association, began representing Chandler’s son and immediately took control of the situation. He filed a $30 million civil lawsuit against Jackson, which would prove to be the beginning of the end.

Once news of the suit spread, the wolves began lining up at the door. According to a member of Jackson’s legal team, “Feldman got dozens of letters from all kinds of people saying they’d been molested by Jackson. They went through all of them trying to find somebody, and they found zero.”

With the possibility of criminal charges against Jackson now looming, Bert Fields brought in Howard Weitzman, a well-known criminal-defense lawyer with a string of high-profile clients—including John DeLorean, whose trail he won, and Kim Basinger, whose Boxing Helena contract dispute he lost. (Also, for a short time this June, Weitzman was O.J. Simpson’s attorney.) Some predicted a problem between the two lawyers early on. There wasn’t room for two strong attorneys used to running their own show.

From the day Weitzman joined Jackson’s defense team, “he was talking settlement,” says Bonnie Ezkenazi, an attorney who worked for the defense. With Fields and Pellicano still in control of Jackson’s defense, they adopted an aggressive strategy. They believed staunchly in Jackson’s innocence and vowed to fight the charges in court. Pellicano began gathering evidence to use in the trial, which was scheduled for March 21, 1994. “They had a very weak case,” says Fields. “We wanted to fight. Michael wanted to fight and go through a trial. We felt we could win.”

Dissension within the Jackson camp accelerated on November 12, after Jackson’s publicist announced at a press conference that the singer was canceling the remainder of his world tour to go into a drug-rehabilitation program to treat his addiction to painkillers. Fields later told reporters that Jackson was “barely able to function adequately on an intellectual level.” Others in Jackson’s camp felt it was a mistake to portray the singer as incompetent. “It was important,” Fields says, “to tell the truth. [Larry] Feldman and the press took the position that Michael was trying to hide and that it was all a scam. But it wasn’t.”

On November 23, the friction peaked. Based on information he says he got from Weitzman, Fields told a courtroom full of reporters that a criminal indictment against Jackson seemed imminent. Fields had a reason for making the statement: He was trying to delay the boy’s civil suit by establishing that there was an impending criminal case that should be tried first. Outside the courtroom, reporters asked why Fields had made the announcement, to which Weitzman replied essentially that Fields “misspoke himself.” The comment infuriated Fields, “because it wasn’t true,” he says. “It was just an outrage. I was very upset with Howard.” Fields sent a letter of resignation to Jackson the following week.

“There was this vast group of people all wanting to do a different thing, and it was like moving through molasses to get a decision,” says Fields. “It was a nightmare, and I wanted to get the hell out of it.” Pellicano, who had received his share of flak for his aggressive manner, resigned at the same time.

With Fields and Pellicano gone, Weitzman brought in Johnnie Cochran Jr., a well-known civil attorney who is now helping defend O.J. Simpson. And John Branca, whom Fields had replaced as Jackson’s general counsel in 1990, was back on board. In late 1993, as DAs in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties convened grand juries to assess whether criminal charges should be filed against Jackson, the defense strategy changed course and talk of settling the civil case began in earnest, even though his new team also believed in Jackson’s innocence.

Why would Jackson’s side agree to settle out of court, given his claims of innocence and the questionable evidence against him? His attorneys apparently decided there were many factors that argued against taking the case to civil court. Among them was the fact that Jackson’s emotional fragility would be tested by the oppressive media coverage that would likely plague the singer day after day during a trial that could last as long as six months. Politics and racial issues had also seeped into legal proceedings—particularly in Los Angeles, which was still recovering from the Rodney King ordeal—and the defense feared that a court of law could not be counted on to deliver justice. Then, too, there was the jury mix to consider. As one attorney says, “They figured that Hispanics might resent [Jackson] for his money, blacks might resent him for trying to be white, and whites would have trouble getting around the molestation issue.” In Resnick’s opinion, “The hysteria is so great and the stigma [of child molestation] is so strong, there is no defenseagainst it.”

Jackson’s lawyers also worried about what might happen if a criminal trial followed, particularly in Santa Barbara, which is a largely white, conservative, middle-to-upper-class community. Any way the defense looked at it, a civil trial seemed too big a gamble. By meeting the terms of a civil settlement, sources say, the lawyers figured they could forestall a criminal trial through a tacit understanding that Chandler would agree to make his son unavailable to testify.

Others close to the case say the decision to settle also probably had to do with another factor—the lawyers’ reputations. “Can you imagine what would happen to an attorney who lost the Michael Jackson case?” says Anthony Pellicano. “There’s no way for all three lawyers to come out winners unless they settle. The only person who lost is Michael Jackson.” But Jackson, says Branca, “changed his mind about [taking the case to trial] when he returned to this country. He hadn’t seen the massive coverage and how hostile it was. He just wanted the whole thing to go away.”

On the other side, relationships among members of the boy’s family had become bitter. During a meeting in Larry Feldman’s office in late 1993, Chandler, a source says, “completely lost it and beat up Dave [Schwartz].” Schwartz, having separated from June by this time, was getting pushed out of making decisions that affected his stepson, and he resented Chandler for taking the boy and not returning him.

“Dave got mad and told Evan this was all about extortion, anyway, at which point Evan stood up, walked over and started hitting Dave,” a second source says.

To anyone who lived in Los Angeles in January 1994, there were two main topics of discussion—the earthquake and the Jackson settlement. On January 25, Jackson agreed to pay the boy an undisclosed sum. The day before, Jackson’s attorneys had withdrawn the extortion charges against Chandler and Rothman.

The actual amount of the settlement has never been revealed, although speculation has placed the sum around $20 million. One source says Chandler and June Chandler Schwartz received up to $2 million each, while attorney Feldman might have gotten up to 25 percent in contingency fees. The rest of the money is being held in trust for the boy and will be paid out under the supervision of a court-appointed trustee.

“Remember, this case was always about money,” Pellicano says, “and Evan Chandler wound up getting what he wanted.” Since Chandler still has custody of his son, sources contend that logically this means the father has access to any money his son gets.

By late May 1994, Chandler finally appeared to be out of dentistry. He’d closed down his Beverly Hills office, citing ongoing harassment from Jackson supporters. Under the terms of the settlement, Chandler is apparently prohibited from writing about the affair, but his brother, Ray Charmatz, was reportedly trying to get a book deal.

In what may turn out to be the never-ending case, this past August, both Barry Rothman and Dave Schwartz (two principal players left out of the settlement) filed civil suits against Jackson. Schwartz maintains that the singer broke up his family. Rothman’s lawsuit claims defamation and slander on the part of Jackson, as well as his original defense team—Fields, Pellicano and Weitzman—for the allegations of extortion. “The charge of [extortion],” says Rothman attorney Aitken, “is totally untrue. Mr. Rothman has been held up for public ridicule, was the subject of a criminal investigation and suffered loss of income.” (Presumably, some of Rothman’s lost income is the hefty fee he would have received had he been able to continue as Chandler’s attorney through the settlement phase.)

As for Michael Jackson, “he is getting on with his life,” says publicist Michael Levine. Now married, Jackson also recently recorded three new songs for a greatest-hits album and completed a new music video called “History.”

And what became of the massive investigation of Jackson? After millions of dollars were spent by prosecutors and police departments in two jurisdictions, and after two grand juries questioned close to 200 witnesses, including 30 children who knew Jackson, not a single corroborating witness could be found. (In June 1994, still determined to find even one corroborating witness, three prosecutors and two police detectives flew to Australia to again question Wade Robson, the boy who had acknowledged that he’d slept in the same bed with Jackson. Once again, the boy said that nothing bad had happened.)

The sole allegations leveled against Jackson, then, remain those made by one youth, and only after the boy had been give a potent hypnotic drug, leaving him susceptible to the power of suggestion.

“I found the case suspicious,” says Dr. Underwager, the Minneapolis psychiatrist, “precisely because the only evidence came from one boy. That would be highly unlikely. Actual pedophiles have an average of 240 victims in their lifetime. It’s a progressive disorder. They’re never satisfied.”

Given the slim evidence against Jackson, it seems unlikely he would have been found guilty had the case gone to trial. But in the court of public opinion, there are no restrictions. People are free to speculate as they wish, and Jackson’s eccentricity leaves him vulnerable to the likelihood that the public has assumed the worst about him.

So is it possible that Jackson committed no crime—that he is what he has always purported to be, a protector and not a molester of children? Attorney Michael Freeman thinks so: “It’s my feeling that Jackson did nothing wrong and these people [Chandler and Rothman] saw an opportunity and programmed it. I believe it was all about money.”

To some observers, the Michael Jackson story illustrates the dangerous power of accusation, against which there is often no defense—particularly when the accusations involve child sexual abuse. To others, something else is clear now—that police and prosecutors spent millions of dollars to create a case whose foundation never existed.

Ostensibly a story about bringing a child molester to justice, the Michael Jackson trial would instead be a kind of homecoming parade of insipid American types grifters, suckers and no-talent schemers, mired in either outright unemployment… or the bogus non-careers of the information age, looking to cash in any way they can.The MC of the proceedings was District Attorney Tom Sneddon, whose metaphorical role in this American reality show was to represent the mean gray heart of the Nixonian Silent Majority – the bitter mediocrity itching to stick it to anyone who’d ever taken a vacation to Paris. The first month or so of the trial featured perhaps the most compromised collection of prosecution witnesses ever assembled in an American criminal case – almost to a man a group of convicted liars, paid gossip hawkers or worse. The early witnesses against Jackson included a bodyguard who missed court because he was in custody facing charges stemming from a series of armed robberies, including holding up a Jack in the Box at gunpoint; a former Neverland maid who’d stolen a sketch Jackson had made of Elvis Presley and sold it to the tabloids for thirty grand; another former employee who’d lost a wrongful-termination suit against Jackson and had to pay part of a $1.4 million settlement as a result.

And then there was the very key figure in the case, the accuser’s mother, who had to plead the Fifth Amendment on the first day of her testimony to avoid cross-examination on a welfare-fraud allegation – a witness so completely full of sh—t that Sneddon’s own assistants cringed openly throughout most of her five days of testimony. In the next six weeks, virtually every piece of his case imploded in open court, and the chief drama of the trial quickly turned into a race to see if the DA could manage to put all of his witnesses on the stand without getting any of them removed from the courthouse in manacles.

Sneddon’s hard-on for Jackson was a faith-based vengeance grab every bit as blind and desperate as George Bush’s “case” against Saddam Hussein. If Ahmad Chalabi had ever been to Neverland, Sneddon would have put him on the stand too.

His case was bullsh—t.California vs. Jackson turned out to be basically a tale of a family of low-rent grifters trying to lay a criminal-molestation charge on a rich celebrity as a prelude to a civil suit.